> top developers outside ai labs will be spending 50k USD+ on inference
I think it is more like top companies, not top developers, and the problem with developers in top companies was and is - absolute majority of them are not actually directly working on things that increase revenue, so companies can spend a ton of money and see barely if any changes in the product and the bottom line, so companies, at least legacy ones will be reluctant to sponsor that long term.
not sure how "top developers" are defined here, but there is huge diminishing return curve starts kicking in after $200/month price point for typical eng work.
I agree with the diminishing returns on spend, but worth noting that when on an Enterprise seat and paying API rates, I'd say that you can easily spend above 200/mo before seeing the curve begin to flatten
Obviously there are a ton of ways to spend money / tokens and people have different levels of experience that will put this ceiling at very different levels for different people.
I think that we are starting to see that API inference prices for US labs are excessive and subscription prices are closer to real costs so 200/m can be realistic longer term.
I mean I don't think $50k is the ceiling, unless you're talking about actual cash out. Claude code subscriptions right now can easily clear you $25-35k a year in nominal value for $2400 out of pocket cost.
Given sufficient budget and scope, I could certainly productively burn a half million dollars in tokens a year or more. I think that's where we're headed anyway, buying a 2nd or 5th claude max subscription feels slightly excessive for personal usage, but at a corporate level...
And a moderately heavy user dev can easily spend a few $K a month, so yeah. Not impossible, but a high cost, and the diminishing returns definitely kick in
My prediction is that, this time next year, top developers outside ai labs will be spending 50k USD+ on inference.
Within labs, I've heard spend is already far beyond this per developer.